Within a few decades following the end of the Second World War, Germany moved from a country of middling wealth per capita to one of the wealthiest countries in the world. In the meantime, the Japanese, very poor indeed in 1945 in spite of a strong showing in terms of industrialisation and technology, joined that select club only about a decade after the Germans. At the same time, Germans and Japanese became in general more economically equal. This is reflected in the rise of consumerism in both countries, and increasingly the nations’ affluent consumers showed no hesitation whatsoever in purchasing domestically manufactured white goods and many other products. In doing so, they helped power the countries’ respective economic miracles. Moreover, their purchases and savings also made the companies that produced the goods more financially secure while at the same time enabling increasing levels of technological capability. This provided a sound basis for those firms to move ever more aggressively into export markets by the end of the first quarter-century after the war’s end. West Germany forged into these export markets earlier than the Japanese, who were less reliant on export for growth.

The world is undergoing unprecedented change as a result of global population increases, rapid urbanization, and the acceleration of affluence in developing countries, which leads to increased consumption of resources and impactful emissions.

We need an alternative economic system founded on the physical constraints of the living Earth rather than on economic abstractions. To confront the neo-liberal paradigm at its core, we must build a society in which individual sufficiency coexists with public luxury, rather than one based on the paradigm of infinite growth.

Like Spear Smith, Catley was intensely self-conscious, sought to create an identity founded on ruralism, and had cultural aspirations (in his case literary rather than artistic). While Catley was no more successful as a poet than Spear Smith as an artist, at least in his younger years his engagement with rural landscapes appears to have brought him more satisfaction and peace of mind. In part, this was because Catley’s ruralism fostered rather than replaced social relationships, through walks, cycle rides and, especially, youth hostelling. It may also have been that less was at stake in Catley’s ruralism, allowing him to take a more objective interest in rural landscapes and, paradoxically, to find more emotional fulfilment in them. Certainly Catley explored the rural landscapes around his Bristol home both intensively and extensively, offering him rich opportunities for self-discovery and self-development. However, as middle age and domesticity came upon him, the vital and life-affirming role landscape had played in his younger days receded into the past.

This chapter examines the middle-class milieu and setting of much of Salman Rushdie’s work. Such an exploration of the upwardly mobile, increasingly affluent, and globally connected Indian bourgeoisie highlights their elaborate lifestyle and aspirations. Another common thread binding the characters in Rushdie’s novels is the city of Bombay/Mumbai. This is the city that his middle-class bourgeois characters share with the criminal classes and the entertainment industry. In Mumbai the lines between the legitimate and the criminal are very often blurred, and many of Rushdie’s protagonists find themselves teetering over the abyss of the underworld. Those of Rushdie’s characters that have moved into global spaces of power and affluence are still umbilically attached to their natal city, where they were born middle-class, but have achieved wealth through crime or the world of entertainment, and have either voluntarily left the island city or have had to flee it. Instead of an omnibus overview, this chapter offers an in-depth analysis of Rushdie’s upwardly mobile middle class as they move from Bombay to London and from there to the new world in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and The Golden House.

This chapter considers how Britain’s developmental, retail-oriented models of planning played out in individual cities across the 1940s and 1950s. It shows that many councils viewed planning as a tool of proactive economic management and enthusiastically bent their powers to the task of promoting valuable new retail development. These activities coincided with a spectacular shops boom in most cities as large retail chains reaped the benefits of full employment and rising wages to embark on major programmes of shop-building and expansion. Councils and retail chains worked in tandem to erect huge new stores all over the country and refit urban centres for the affluent age. At times urban authorities even played the part of commercial developer themselves by putting up shops and collecting business rents. I relate these practices to councils’ energetic pre-war activities in the field of municipal enterprise and show that post-war planning powers offered a new outlet for these long-standing traditions of civic entrepreneurship. The chapter also shows how central government promoted the nascent commercial property sector in British redevelopment from the 1950s.

This chapter examines the curious new landscapes of affluence which were installed in Britain’s towns and cities in the post-war decades. It shows how new shopping spaces were consciously engineered by designers as entertaining spectacles and served as sites in which a new public culture of affluence and acquisition was propagated. I relate this to the powerful political and cultural critiques of new retail environments which have proliferated in literatures on the ‘postmodern’ consumer city. I also stress that, in the 1960s, many public planners felt themselves to be engaged in the production of a new and energising type of civic space in the redeveloped shopping landscape and saw this endeavour in light of contemporary ideas about entitlements to mass leisure. For the more high-minded public planners new retail developments were a means of revitalising public space and public culture through uniting the civic with the commercial realms, and thus reflected the wider mingling of the categories of citizen and consumer, of welfare statehood with affluence. In practice this attempt to harness commercial retail development with an invigorated urban public sphere was inherently unstable and could not be sustained over the longer term.

This chapter provides an overview of global poverty and the debate on transnational socioeconomic justice. It begins by examining the current state of global poverty and the argument that it is in decline; it finds reason to be cautious about optimistic narratives on the decline of poverty. It then looks at global inequality and the uneven distribution of wealth between the human population. It then returns to look at poverty as an existential experience and how it is corrosive to a minimally acceptable human life.

It then considers the debate on transnational socio-economic justice between cosmopolitans and their critics. It provides a general distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory.It settles on a minimalist position as its point of departure for the injustice of global poverty. It argues that all sides have neglected the problem of intransigent non-compliance. There is little likelihood that compliance with even minimal duties of justice will occur in the near future. This raises the question of what the victims of injustice should do when there is no remedy on offer.